


All Fingers & Thumbs

by popfly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Community: cottoncandy_bingo, Deaf, Deaf Character, Finger Sucking, Injury, M/M, Pack, Sign Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 10:49:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popfly/pseuds/popfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison loses her hearing and Stiles makes the pack learn ASL. Derek likes Stiles's fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Fingers & Thumbs

**Author's Note:**

> For filmatleven and sonicbookmark, because they think Stiles's hands are as hot as I do. But I bet we don't find them as hot as Derek does.

After the dust has settled (literally and figuratively, the Hale house had been dusty enough without one of Argent’s hunters going rogue and blowing it to smithereens) Stiles crawls out from behind his Jeep, coughing, and calls out for the pack.

Everyone emerges mostly intact (Isaac’s leg gets crushed when the stairs collapse on him and Derek has a truly impressive array of shrapnel sticking out of his back), but Allison is bleeding from the ears in a way that has Scott unable to shift back to human, whining over her and nudging her neck with his nose.

Stiles’s ears are ringing and he hadn’t been nearly as close to the blast as Allison had been. He opens the door to his Jeep and fidgets while Derek lays Allison out in the backseat, thanking whatever instinct had made him park farther back than usual when the Jeeps starts up easily, and he drives as carefully and as quickly as he can to the hospital.

When the doctor says the chances of her hearing coming back are slim, Scott looks like he’s going to crawl out of his skin, and Stiles can imagine how badly he wants to go out to the preserve and claw at a tree or howl at the sky, because Stiles feels almost exactly the same. Mr. Argent is as white as the sheets on the hospital bed, and Stiles drags Scott out of the room to give them time.

Allison spends one whole day staring at the wall, refusing to speak, and refusing the pen and pad of paper that the nurses have placed on the rolling table next to her bed. They say it’s normal that people who lose their hearing in traumatic incidents don’t want to talk because they can’t hear themselves and that makes it worse. Scott paces in the hall, Derek (after Stiles convinced him that he needed to dig all the shrapnel out of his flesh and heal, not to mention change clothing, before coming to the hospital) sits in the waiting room with the rest of the pack, all of them staring down at the floor and frowning.

Stiles goes home that night and Googles local ASL instructors.

The next day Allison is smiling, though thinly, and scribbling furiously on her pad. _Done wallowing_ , she writes, pale but determined, _what’s next?_

Scott and Mr. Argent exchange looks, they’d already taken care of the guy responsible (and Stiles doesn’t want to know how violently, he can only imagine what he would’ve done in the same situation, not that he has an Allison, but he’d wanted to fuck Peter Hale up pretty badly after he attacked Lydia) but clearly don’t want to talk about it.

“Um,” Stiles interjects, pulling the papers he’d printed out the night before out of his pocket and unfolding them. “I found someone who can teach us sign language. If that’s something you’re, you know, okay with. I mean, some people who are deaf but can still speak prefer lip reading, but that’s a lot more subjective, and … ,” he trails off, realizing that, duh, Allison can’t hear him. He passes the papers over to her and lets her read over them, then takes her pad and writes on it when she gives him a look of obvious inquiry.

_Someone to teach us sign language._

Allison ducks her head and writes on her pad. She holds it up but doesn’t lift her head, and Scott is gripping the railing of the bed so hard it looks like it might shatter at any second.

_Teach us?_ The “us” is underlined three times.

Stiles thinks Allison may be wiping a tear out of her eye, and scratches at his jaw nervously, taking the paper back.

_The whole pack should learn, right?_

Allison’s eyes jump up to her dad’s face and Stiles wishes he had chosen a different word than “pack” but it’s out there already, and Mr. Argent doesn’t even flinch, he just looks grateful. Allison nods, a tear sliding down her cheek, and Scott leans over her to give her a hug.

“Thank you,” Mr. Argent says, his hand coming down on Stiles’s shoulder. Scott straightens up so fast Stiles thinks he can hear his spine pop and then he’s grabbing Stiles in an awkward hug.

Stiles pats him on the back. “No worries, guys.” He gives Allison a thumbs up, and backs out of the room before the gratitude makes him weepy.

He pitches his idea to the rest of the pack in the waiting room.

"That’s … a good idea,” Derek says, and Stiles doesn’t miss the hesitation. Like he never has good ideas.

“It’s brilliant,” Boyd says.

“Not a big deal, really. It’s just a dude who’s studying to be an interpreter, so he’s going to copy his books and DVDs from school and he’s pretty cheap, and he’s available weekends, which is when I figure we can all get together.” Stiles takes a breath. “We could start this weekend?” 

*****

Stiles stays up most of Friday night watching signing tutorials on YouTube because once he’s decided to learn something he has to become an expert as soon as he can. He only stumbles to bed after he’s memorized the entire alphabet and is woken the next day by a thump and a muttered curse.

“Whazzat,” he mumbles, squinting towards the window and the dark shape outlined by bright sun.

“You left your shoes in front of the window again.”

Stiles shoves to a sitting position, thumbing drool from his lip. “Better than a pyramid of soda cans, you would’ve woken the whole neighborhood.”

Derek scowls. “Most of the neighborhood is already awake.”

“Most of the neighborhood wasn’t up until four thirty.” Stiles twists his shoulders until his spine pops. “I don’t think you have any right to scowl when you’re crawling in my window and waking me up.”

“You said to be here by ten thirty.”

Stiles gives the bright blue “10:01” on his alarm clock a meaningful glance before raising his eyebrows at Derek. Derek keeps scowling, but he breaks eye contact. Stiles doesn’t need any YouTube videos to interpret that one, in Derek Sign Language that means he’s conceding a point. 

Stiles swings his legs out of bed and stretches to his feet, yawning. “Make yourself useful at least and drag the dining room chairs into the living room, I’m going to shower.”

Derek does one of his exasperated through-the-nose exhales and stalks past Stiles into the hallway. 

“Make coffee too, you clearly need it,” Stiles shouts after him, smiling to himself. 

The first lesson goes surprisingly well. They watch an introductory DVD (with subtitles) all about deaf culture and the history of American Sign Language, and everyone takes notes. Scott looks serious in a way he never does in school, and when Stiles glances at his paper his handwriting actually looks legible. The instructor has to replay the section on the importance of facial expressions twice, shooting a nervous glance in Derek and Jackson’s direction. Stiles coughs into his fist and receives a satisfying glare from both of them before they both try to smooth out their foreheads.

“Thanks again for doing this,” Mr. Argent says after the instructor has packed up and left. Allison and Lydia are typing furiously on their phones, holding them up in turn for the other to read. Scott is hovering over them, fretting the way he’d been doing since Allison had been discharged from the hospital. 

“No problem, really,” Stiles says, and prides himself on not flinching when Mr. Argent claps a hand on his back.

Mr. Argent taps Allison’s shoulder to get her attention and then hitches his thumb at the door. She nods, hugging Lydia and kissing Scott, stuffing her phone and her notebook into her purse. She approaches Stiles with a smile and shining eyes, and Stiles ducks his head, embarrassed, but accepts her hug.

Derek and Boyd clean up, and Jackson almost smiles at him on his way out the door, and Stiles thinks all in all the whole thing is a massive success.

*****

They’re four lessons in when Stiles notices it. 

He’s running through one of the model conversations in the textbook with Isaac, asking him “who hurt your feelings” (and fully expecting Isaac to break script and answer “everyone”) when he glances over Isaac’s shoulder and sees Derek staring at them.

Staring at Stiles.

Staring at Stiles’s hands.

Stiles falters slightly when he moves on to the next question, asking Isaac why he’s sad (and again expecting him to break script and answer “everything”), and his hands stutter halfway through the sign for “sad”, his fingers curled too tight. Derek’s eyes track the movement, and they look almost glazed. He’s out of it in a way Stiles has never seen before, and Stiles feels his heart beat a fraction faster.

Derek shakes his head, like he’s trying to get water out of his ears, and goes back to frowning at Boyd.

“Uh, Stiles?” Isaac’s hands are suspended mid-air, and his voice is jarring in the quiet room. 

“Sorry, yeah, go on.” Stiles focuses on Isaac as he signs the next part of the conversation, and they finish up the lesson.

It happens again the next week, the look on Derek’s face distracting Stiles so badly he skips from twenty-six straight to thirty when they’re running through their numbers. The week after Derek actually licks his lips when Stiles is shaping the sign for “red”. 

Stiles pulls Lydia aside after the lesson, and she lets Stiles yank her into the kitchen with only one exasperated sigh and her hands on her hips. 

“Derek keeps staring at my hands,” he says, and Lydia bursts out laughing.

She laughs so hard she actually doubles over, and Stiles is torn between finding it really freaking cute and being really freaking annoyed. He settles somewhere in the middle and waits her out, his arms crossed.

“You are an actual idiot,” is what she ends up gasping at him, and that pushes him right over the line into irritated.

“Why?”

“Because,” she says, and now she’s serious again, though Stiles can see the amusement lingering around her mouth. “Look, I’ll lay it out for you. Derek has been sniffing around you like a dog in heat for months. If he’s staring at your hands it’s probably because he’s imagining the dirty things you could be doing with them.”

Stiles gapes at her and she lets a wicked smile curl across her face.

“To him.”

He thinks the clunk of his jaw hitting the floor can probably be heard in the next county over, and Lydia tosses her hair and leaves him standing there stunned stupid.

*****

He mulls it over all night and decides to turn it into an experiment. He watches all the videos for their next lesson ahead of time, which isn’t abnormal, but this time he’s looking for the signs with the most elaborate movements, the ones where he has to curl his fingers in a way that maybe could be considered sexy.

Watching his own fingers doesn’t do it for him, so he tries to imagine Derek’s hands instead, and ends up getting hard so fast he feels lightheaded.

Stiles is hyper-aware of Derek all through the lesson, and has to focus on his heartbeat to keep it steady. He’s already getting weird looks from Isaac, and he doesn’t want to raise the hackles of every werewolf in the room. 

When they get to the first sign Stiles had put on his “sexy signs” list, he glances up at Derek while his fingers make the shapes, and yup, Derek is staring. A lot. If Derek could shoot lasers with his eyes Stiles’s fingers would be burnt off. Which is decidedly unsexy and also leads Stiles’s brain on a tangent about werewolves having laser eyes and other superpowers than just increased strength and senses, and then he fumbles the sign and Isaac sighs.

Stiles still considers it a successful test.

All three of his tests are successful that day, and he decides something needs to be done about it. He’d always been attracted to Derek (he’s pretty sure inanimate objects were attracted to Derek) but over the last year Derek had become someone that Stiles could really like, especially now that the physical violence was saved for situations when it was necessary (like killing things that threatened the pack, not for expressing frustration with sarcastic teenagers), and if Derek was feeling any of that towards Stiles than that was a good thing.

Stiles shoos everyone out as quickly as he could after the lesson, taking advantage of Derek being in the bathroom to shove them out the door. He’s nonchalantly gathering empty cups when Derek comes back into the living room, his eyebrows drawn together.

“I wasn’t in there that long.”

“They were in a hurry, I guess?” Stiles shrugs, his arms full of mugs, and heads into the kitchen. Derek grabs the rest of the dishes and follows, and their shoulders brush as they unload the cups and plates into the sink. 

“Want help moving the furniture back?” Derek asks, and makes a move towards the living room. Stiles stops him with a hand on his arm, and Derek’s eyebrows go up so fast they look like they’re trying to escape into his hairline.

“Wait. I have,” he starts, and shakes his head, feeling flustered already. He practiced what he wanted to say the night before, but now that he has the opportunity he doesn’t know if his fingers will stop trembling long enough to make it coherent. Derek’s eyebrows are still doing something complicated on his forehead, but Stiles thinks there’s something almost like hope in his eyes, and he takes a deep breath and lifts his hands.

The signs for “you”, “me”, and “date” aren’t on the sexy list as far as shapes go, but it’s the question that Stiles needs the answer to. Derek looks confused for a second, and Stiles worries that he doesn’t remember what the signs mean, they’d gone over dating already but not extensively, and then Derek raises one hand in a fist and makes it nod.

Stiles’s grin is so wide his cheeks hurt, and Derek smiles back, small and pleased and a little surprised.

“How’d you know?”

“I guessed, mostly. You’ve been staring at my hands, and Lydia said it was because you were imagining … “ Stiles trails off, and grimaces. He hadn’t been planning on mentioning that bit.

Derek crowds him against the counter in a blur of movement, and Stiles mentally curses werewolf speed when his spine knocks against the edge of the sink. The sting is forgotten when Derek’s hands curl around his hips, and he feels Derek’s breath fanning hot across the sensitive skin under his earlobe.

“I _have_ been imagining,” Derek says, stubble scraping lightly across Stiles’s throat as Derek inhales deep, nosing along the neckline of Stiles’s tee shirt.

“What have you been imagining?” Stiles can’t believe the way his voice sounds, low and dirty like something out of a porn video, and he would be embarrassed if Derek didn’t respond with a rumble and a press of his mouth to Stiles’s collar bone.

Derek’s voice is just as raspy when he speaks, and Stiles feels like his knees are liquefying when he says, “I’ve been imagining your hands on my cock.”

That cannot be a thing that was just said, Stiles is sure that he’s dreaming. Maybe Derek responded to the request for a date by knocking Stiles out and now Stiles is in a coma. “Oh my god,” is the only response he can think of, and he punctuates it by grabbing fistfuls of Derek’s shirt.

“It’s a little lower, Stiles,” Derek says, and Stiles can feel him grin against his neck before he bites, gently enough that Stiles doesn’t startle and instead lets out a breathy kind of moan.

“I would make the sign for ‘bedroom’ right now but I think you may have short-circuited my brain,” Stiles says, and slides his hands down, bringing one around to brush against the fly of Derek’s jeans. He’s definitely hard under the denim, and Stiles’s fingers shake as he cups the shape of him.

Derek gasps and drags his face along Stiles’s jaw to seal their mouths together, and if Stiles is in a coma he doesn’t ever want to wake up.

Stiles’s fingers drag along Derek’s jeans, and Derek shudders, pulling back to growl, “Upstairs, now,” an order Stiles is happy to follow.

Derek undresses Stiles and then himself when Stiles’s fingers tangle together in their haste to get under Derek’s shirt. Stiles is still busy gaping at Derek’s … well, at his everything, really, raking over expanses of skin stretching over muscle, trying to decide where he wants to touch first when he wants to touch all of it at once. Derek makes the decision for him, circling his hand around Stiles’s wrist and lifting it to his mouth, and Stiles feels the bristle of stubble against his fingertips before they’re sliding into Derek’s hot, wet mouth.

Stiles whimpers, his legs shaking as Derek’s tongue slides between his knuckles, and he has to grab on to Derek’s biceps with his free hand to keep from collapsing to the floor when Derek hollows his cheeks and sucks, sliding his mouth off with a slick pop.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks.”

Stiles laughs breathlessly, letting his wet fingers drift down Derek’s chest. “Were there other things you’ve been wanting to do?”

Derek’s eyebrow tilts and he smirks in a way Stiles can only describe as naughty. He shoves Stiles back onto the mattress and lifts his hands, making a circle with one and holding out his other index finger, and Stiles wonders for a moment what he’s going to sign before he makes a crude gesture that has Stiles simultaneously blushing and rolling his eyes.

“That is not in the course work,” Stiles says, and reaches out to pull Derek in.


End file.
